Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion (1823): Conversations and the Statue

Summary

Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. Such was love's nature.

(Julian Barnes, ‘The Revival’, The New Yorker)

The subtitle of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion, published anonymously in 1823, promises a retelling of Ovid's Augustan myth of transformation set in Regency England, a translation from classical to modern times. Unlike Ovid's poetic invention of a distant mythological past, Hazlitt's prose version takes place in the quotidian world of London's lodging houses. However, early nineteenth-century London has no pagan Venus who can effect the metamorphosis required by Hazlitt's narrator. Obviously, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), the subtitle is ironic, and questions the pertinence of classical mythology to the modern world. There is a discomfitingly negative relationship between the shapely narratives of the past and their twisted, confusing contemporary forms, and in both stories the subjects refuse to obey their master.

Hazlitt's text recounts the story of H—'s unrequited love for S. L., told for the most part in his words. Part I is mainly made up of scenes based on reconstructed conversations in H—'s lodgings, Part II of H—'s letters to C. P—, and Part III of letters to another young friend, J. S. K—. The whole text is preceded by an ‘Advertisement’ which claims the book is based on a manuscript by ‘a native of North Britain’, who recently died in the Netherlands ‘of disappointment preying on a sickly frame and morbid mind’. The Pygmalion parallel is implicit: H—likens S. L. to ‘a graceful marble statue’ (p. 12), and she is frequently described as marble or stone as well as being called an idol and likened to a picture.

In the economy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, human intervention in the Gods’ affairs normally works to the humans’ ultimate disadvantage: uniquely the Pygmalion episode is affirmative, uniting art and nature. As Marina Warner says of the transformation:

When [Pygmalion's statue] steps out of illusion into reality through her creator's desire, she fulfills the delusory promises of art itself, the nearest equivalent to generation in the single, uncoupled manner of the gods that man can reach.